


life-days

by Seefin



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-24
Updated: 2019-02-24
Packaged: 2019-11-05 03:45:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17911388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seefin/pseuds/Seefin
Summary: Some of them are lonely words, like code, or the answers to a crossword puzzle.Bellatrix – Surrey – Horcrux - Sunflowers.Harry reads them and wants to be sick. He does not know what meaning they contain, what they could possibly indicate about Draco’s life.





	life-days

Draco is thinking about writing a book. About the war. It might be that he’s already started, or finished, Harry wouldn’t know. He is only half-aware of it anyway, thanks to the scraps of paper he keeps finding strewn across the house, small notes Draco writes to himself. _Drawing Boundaries at Herfield House,_ one of them says, _from the library at the Manor_. Some of them are lonely words, like code, or the answers to a crossword puzzle. _Bellatrix – Surrey – Horcrux - Sunflowers._ Harry reads them and wants to be sick. He does not know what meaning they contain, what they could possibly indicate about Draco’s life.

It is clear that Draco has gone to some effort to hide them, underneath the stack of books on their bedside table, stuffed down deep between the sofa cushions, slid under the dented tin where they keep their teabags. Harry looks at the way Draco’s long scrawl loops across the back of a receipt and thinks about Draco boiling the kettle while Harry is away, reaching to get a mug from the top cupboard, his pen darting across the thin, pleasantly crinkled paper. He wonders if Draco conveniently forgets about them, as a way to tell Harry things without having to actually tell Harry things.

He arrives home late at night and then walks slowly around the house, checking all the windows are locked, and lands his fingertips on the edge of a notebook, tucked out of sight between the window pane and the curtains. It is leather-bound and thin, and has a delicate cord wrapped three times tenderly around the middle. Harry frowns down at it and thinks about all the things Draco might have written, about the war or the end of the war or the time after the end of the war, which they’re living in now. Harry’s constant, simmering urge to know Draco better than any person has known any other person rises inside him like bile, sticks in his throat. He places the notebook back where it lives. He flicks the lock on the window-frame open with his thumb, closed, open, closed again, checking. Draco used to live in a magic house, and then a magic castle, and is still under the impression a well-constructed ward could save his life. He forgets to lock things.

“What could he have to say about the war that anyone would even want to hear?” Hermione asks, when Harry tries to discuss it with her. It is early and the air is still cool, the cobblestones damp underneath their feet as they walk to the starting point of the protest. They are meeting Ginny and the rest there. Harry doesn’t really know for sure what the protest is meant to be about, though he thinks it is something about student loans. He has a hard time keeping up with the news, even when it’s in non-magical newspapers. He will read a headline and become so completely depressed and at odds with himself that he will barely be able to go out into the world. He reads the news and spends long hours in the bath afterwards recovering. Sometimes Draco will try to talk about an issue over dinner and Harry will snap at him, and Draco will flare his nostrils like he’s trying not to get pissed off. Harry never intends to upset him, he doesn’t know how it is that they’ve been together for so many years without Harry ever working out how to communicate effectively the things about which he does not wish to talk. He worries that Draco thinks Harry does not want to listen to what he has to say, even though this is not true.

“I don’t know,” Harry says, shrugging. The sudden movement of his shoulder forces a corner of the placard he is carrying directly into the soft skin of his armpit. He rearranges it, wincing. It is not Harry’s placard, it is Draco’s, who is skipping his second morning lecture to march with them. Draco is studying Greek and English at UCL, which is a non-magical university, which means he is affected by things like fee changes. He brings home large books from the university library and reads them in bed, and he completes essays on topics such as Literary Representation or the History of Homosexuality, and explains things to Harry using large, encompassing hand gestures. He has bought a small laptop for research, and says that most of his fellow students are very young, straight out of school, and it makes him feel old, or like he wishes he too could have gone to university straight from school, instead of what he actually did, which was spend seven years at war. He only says things like that last thing when he’s in a certain mood, or on certain important anniversaries.

Draco was a Death Eater during the first part of the war, and then he was a spy. He sleeps with a knife under his pillow, inside the pillowcase so that it stays in the right place and he can put his hand on it at any moment. He can cast a null-magic ward big enough to incapacitate Hogsmeade. Harry’s seen him do it, long enough ago now that the memory is starting to wear around the edges. He wears reading glasses when he looks at recipes online that he can make in their slow cooker. Harry doesn’t say this to anyone, least of all Hermione, but secretly he thinks there are many things Draco could say about that war that people would want to hear.

Harry was an Auror, during, and that’s all he was, and now he’s not really anything.

They cross the road at a difficult junction, where cars have parked themselves haphazardly at various red lights. Hermione weaves herself easily through the crowds, around vans with engines so hot Harry can feel, as he brushes past them, their heat through his trousers. “He probably has loads to say,” he says to her back, just as they are about to step onto the pavement. She shakes her head roughly, like she doesn’t want to talk about it. Harry feels as though he has betrayed Draco’s trust in some fundamental way. He should have said “He probably has loads to say” as soon as she’d first asked him, as this is what he really thinks.

Hermione doesn’t trust Draco. She hired a stranger to put the wards up on her and Ron’s house, even though Draco could have done it with both hands tied behind his back, his wand on the ground three feet away.

Harry understands her feelings on this, though he does not share them. He was Draco’s handler during the war. He and Draco fought together for six endless years, slogged through them like mud, taught each other spells, slept on the ground like dogs. Harry was one of three people in the whole world who knew about Draco collecting information on the Death Eaters. Towards the end of it all, Harry would see Draco’s white hair on the opposite side of the battleground, the lightning-blue glow of his anti-apparition spell, and feel grateful just to see him standing there, upright, eyes-bright, alive.

Hermione and Ron left the Aurors two years after they joined. They mounted protests, they ran emergency shelters, they collected the kind of intelligence the Aurors could only dream of. One night in the sixth year of the war, they burned a small, seemingly insignificant potions warehouse in Wales right down to the ground. Harry was sent to the scene, to look at the ash and the rubble and ask for things to be sent to the lab. A few nights later Draco met him in a market-town in Kent, and told him that the Death Eaters had started to run out of healing potions, out of ingredients, and they had no way to source more. The end of the war came quickly after that, but Hermione and Ron didn’t fight in it, not the way Harry had. Not in the way Draco had.

Harry and Draco get the bus home after the protest. Draco is tired, he says, and goes to the bathroom, where the shower starts and the toilet flushes. The turnout for the protest was good, according to Ron, who is an authority on these kinds of things. There had been thousands of people there, tens of thousands maybe, most of them young and loud and holding long cloth banners with swear words on them, which did a pretty good job of cheering Harry up. He reads one of their recipe books until he hears Draco get out of the shower, at which point he puts it aside. Draco is in their bedroom, naked but in the process of getting dressed. He has lain out his clothes flat on the bed, underwear, trousers, green socks, a _Harpies_ t-shirt. Since Harry first became close enough to Draco to be able notice this habit, he has loved it.

Harry watches him from the doorway. Draco has seen him, and he starts to smile, in an odd, secret way. He’s started to go grey, which Harry also loves. “How long are you going to stand there,” he says, sitting down on the bed to pull on his socks. He says it as though he does not mind what the answer will be, as though he would let Harry stand in the doorway of their bedroom and watch him for a whole year, for six, for seven.

Harry briefly thinks about mentioning all the papers he’s been finding, the code words, the incomprehensible phrases, the secret notebook behind the curtains, but it doesn’t feel urgent. He wonders what Draco might say about him in a book, what he would say about their time together during the war, whether he would be kind, whether he would be honest. None of that feels urgent either, or like something he might have to worry about.

Later on, when Draco is sitting in bed with his laptop balanced on a pillow in his lap, Harry goes downstairs to close the deadbolt on the front door. The floorboards creak as he walks barefoot across them, through the kitchen and into the hallway, where his toe meets something unfamiliar. It is one of Draco’s shorter notes, written on a torn corner of kitchen-towel, and lying face upwards in the middle of the corridor, as though it got blown in there by a summery breeze, spinning like a leaf. _For Harry,_ the note reads, written in Draco’s gentle hand. Harry smiles, a small and secret one, like Draco's. He picks up the note, locks the front door. He goes upstairs to bed.


End file.
